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Remembering the Travel Scandal at the Port Authority

By Ralph Blumenthal June 24, 2008 4:41 pmJune 24, 2008 4:41 pm

Dr. William J. Ronan at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s offices in 1971. (Photo: Librado Romero/The New York Times)

So the E-ZPass is even easier than anyone thought — good for a lifetime and free, as long as you are, or ever were, a board member of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. But if you’re shocked — shocked! — at that perk (which an embarrassed authority is expected to revoke on Wednesday for former members and restrict to official business along with free transit and commuter rail passes), consider for a moment the freebie-travel scandal that shamed the agency’s more imperious cousin, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, some 30 years ago.

What is it, anyway, about public transportation officials and their travel perks?

By law, trustees, many of them wealthy, serve without pay, so free toll and transit passes, some say, were a way of rewarding them while prompting them to keep a closer eye on the service provided to ordinary fare-paying mortals. One of the M.T.A.’s two vice chairmen, David S. Mack, described his free trips on the Long Island Rail Road as a sacrifice, of sorts, that he was willing to make for the public good: “Why should I ride and inconvenience myself when I can ride in a car?”

In the case of the Port Authority, the Hudson-straddling behemoth that is officially answerable to both states and in reality often regally independent of both, the abuses by unpaid commissioners and high-earning executives mounted into the millions and ended badly: in the spiral of ensuing investigations, two officials took their lives.

The pattern first emerged in June 1977 when a reporter (O.K., this reporter) sought to reach the M.T.A.’s chairman and longtime Port Authority and New York transit potentate, Dr. William J. Ronan, who was reportedly about to resign after a long and distinguished public career under the wing of former Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller.

He had become the first chairman of the newly created M.T.A. when it was known, not for nothing, as the Wholly Ronan Empire and the sobriquet could later as well be applied to Dr. Ronan’s Port Authority, operator of the region’s three major jetports, six river crossings, PATH trains, and bus and marine terminals, and, until 9/11, the twin towers of the World Trade Center.

Dr. Ronan was not available, his office said; he was preparing for his trip.

It soon emerged that another Port Authority commissioner, Milton A. Gilbert, and his wife, as well as the agency’s director of world trade, Guy F. Tozzoli, were also going along. The declared mission: talking to Japanese auto makers about situating a plant in the port area.

But in addition to Tokyo, the itinerary included what were described as stops at reciprocal World Trade Center Association offices in Hong Kong, Singapore, Melbourne, Sydney, Bangkok and London, at a cost per ticket of around $4,600 a person.

The Port Authority spokesman, John Tillman, said that paying for the spouses was a valid public expense because “the wives are important as hostesses at various social functions.” (Remember, this was 1977.)

But the next day the Ronans’ trip was put off amid a swirl of questions by Gov. Hugh L. Carey of New York, and the state’s comptroller, Arthur Levitt, who said that in his 23 years of public service, “I don’t think a comparable situation has come to my notice.”

Gov. Brendan T. Byrne of New Jersey, on the other hand, was mum. The previous October, he and his legislative counsel and frequent companion, Mrs. Jerry English, had flown to Tokyo with Commissioner Gilbert.

In its defense, the Port Authority said such trips had been going on for years — so frequently, in fact, that Mr. Tillman could not immediately tally them all. As he explained, “There is no way we can compile a full list in a few days.”

Then it turned out there were no trade center offices to visit in Bangkok and London. Instead, Mr. Tillman explained, those were “rest stops.”

The Ronans and Gilberts and Mr. Tozzoli flew off shortly afterward.

Meanwhile, Comptroller Levitt’s auditors had uncovered a curious anomaly. While Port Authority commissioners and their wives often flew first class, at least 11 other executives — including Mr. Tozzoli’s brother, Anthony, the director of marine terminals — flew economy but were reimbursed at first-class rates. With the difference, they paid for their wives’ travel.

The auditors also found that the Ronans and Gilberts were accompanied on their trip by a high-level Port Authority go-fer, Carl Kleeberg, who, having drawn a $10,000 cash advance, used the money to ease his bosses’ travels along the way. That way, Mr. Tillman explained, they “don’t have to dig into their pockets.”

Members of the Central Island Commuters Association picketed outside the Garden City Hotel in 1969. (Photo: Ernest Sisto/The New York Times)

The investigations, now joined by Assemblyman Irwin J. Landes’s subcommittee on authorities, were picking up speed — discovering, for example, that the Port Authority had paid for Anthony Tozzoli’s rental of golf clubs on Curaçao; a baby sitter for the children of his brother, Guy, on Barbados; and even a Tokyo massage parlor’s services for Mr. Kleeberg — when fate dealt the beleaguered officials a lucky hand.

The night of this paper’s exposé summarizing the findings was the night the lights went out, July 13, 1977 — New York City’s second major blackout in a dozen years. The front-page article on the Port Authority spending scandal was re-wrapped under a new front page devoted to the blackout, probably the only time in the paper’s history two different front pages ran together on the same night.

But when the power was restored, the inquiries resumed. Not just the toll-paying public paid the way for officials’ travels, it turned out; trips were sometimes laid on by foreign hosts like the Princess Towers Hotel in Freeport, the Bahamas; the Melbourne Harbor Trust; and the Israeli government. Sometimes lesser expenses were billed twice to the Port Authority. And officials sometimes tripped over explanations for their travels: while Guy Tozzoli maintained that a visit to Seoul was strictly business, his assistant, Tom Kearney, said a side trip to Tokyo was “purely for pleasure.” Mr. Tozzoli said he didn’t know what to make of that. It was work for him, he suggested; maybe it was fun for Mr. Kearney.

One Port Authority executive, Thomas F. Donovan, assistant general manager of development and rentals, investigators found, had traveled with his wife to an evidently less-than-urgent business meeting in London. They sailed there on the Queen Elizabeth 2.

In August, Dr. Ronan appeared before Assemblyman Landes’s committee to defend the connubial travels. He said an authority official traveling solo was handicapped: “he has only his own eyes and ears — his spouse would provide two more and all the additional coverage that implies.”

Assemblymen were incredulous. One asked, “Does an unmarried person have a disadvantage?”

And when Dr. Ronan took the occasion to lobby for an extension of the Port Authority’s geographical reach to up to 100 miles from the Statue of Liberty, from 25 miles, one lawmaker cringed, foreseeing, he said, not a twin-towered World Trade Center, then in its infancy, but “triple towers.”

Dr. Ronan’s successor as chairman, Alan Sagner, told the legislators that in three years as a Port Authority commissioner he had never heard about all the foreign trips.

But he and the agency’s new executive director, Peter C. Goldmark Jr. (son of a pioneer of sound recording and inventor of the LP record) declined to be drawn into critiques of what they called “past practices,” preferring to highlight tightened new spending practices.

Still, there were more revelations to come. Dr. Ronan, Governor Byrne and other officials had turned the Port Authority’s three helicopters into a “private air force,” the Landes committee charged, using the choppers for flights to East Hampton, family trips and shopping. They were also driven around “like royalty” in the agency’s 566 vehicles — one for every 14 employees — the panel reported.

Meanwhile, Mr. Tillman, the spokesman who had joined the agency after a career in early television, including the first live color broadcast, was found to have padded his expense account with fictitious entries, many of them naming New York Times reporters he had falsely claimed to have entertained, and was suspended. (He was later reinstated and demoted after repaying $1,600.)

The investigation quickly spread to the M.T.A., where the chief spokesman and another executive were suspended for similar “irregularities,” and the chief spokesman of the New York City Transit Authority said “it’s entirely possible” some of his expense accounts may also have been doctored.

The next day, Nov. 5, 1977, the transit spokesman, Jacques Nevard, 52, a reporter and foreign correspondent of The Times from 1955 to 1967 when he became deputy police commissioner for press relations, jumped to his death from a 13th-floor balcony of transit authority headquarters in Brooklyn. He left a note, officials said, disclaiming wrongdoing but expressing fear that “the media and today’s atmosphere would tarnish that career.”

Little more than two months later, on Jan. 16, 1978, the recently retired treasurer of the Port Authority, Alexander Leslie, 59, who had also been suspended for expense-account irregularities and had also been reinstated, after repaying the agency about $2,000, jumped to his death from the window of his eighth-floor apartment at 203 East 72nd Street in Manhattan.

But the tradition of perks has been hard to live down, officials acknowledged about 15 years later when a Times examination of authority records found executives still spending millions on ceremonial parties at the since-lost Windows on the World, and on a pared-down fleet of automobiles and helicopters.

One employee was put aboard a $970-an-hour flight to Manhattan to file his retirement papers. An authority spokesman, Peter Yerkes, was told to explain it this way: “It can take up to an hour and a half to reach Kennedy Airport at rush hour.”

A great tale of investigative journalism (I got angrier and angrier the further I read). The nerve of these crooks. They even give jumping out of tall buildings a bad name (a fact made tragically ironic by the events of September 11, 2001).

This is gonna sound sycophantic, but it’s true: The way the Internet lets veteran reporters like Ralph share this kind of invaluable history in an entertaining, breezy way with an audience of millions rather than just the crowd at the end of the bar or a classroom of J-school students…stuff like this is at the top of my list of favorite things about the existence of online culture. I’ve lived in Manhattan for 17 years now and consider myself a pretty seasoned New Yorker with an avid interest in the city’s history and politics, but I’ve never heard any of these stories, which are right up there with the best yarns I’ve heard about Boss Tweed and Mayor Jimmie Walker. I’m spellbound.

Great piece. And great photos too. They really capture the flavor of the times. The top photo brings to mind the French Connection. And the bottom photo of Dr. Ronan is the epitome of the term fat cat.

Great article. Thank you. How are “Authorities” legal in the first place. I recently witnessed a meeting with MTA “officials” basically telling two elected officials that, “The MTA doesn’t answer to them.” If the MTA doesn’t answer to the folks that “answer to us” every four years, then who do they answer to? Developers run the city. This city govt needs an enema. Community Boards and Borough presidents are the next scam.

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